Via: Billboard

Unfortunately, as we’ve seen since, for companies whose core product is content — like every newspaper and magazine you read, including this one — the idea that we Internet visionaries sold is a total load of crap. We persuaded executives to compete with themselves online by setting up Web sites that offered for free the same content their staffs labored so strenuously to produce and sell in their print publications. The theory was that companies were supposed to make back the money by, uh, “monetizing the attention economy,” or some other similarly vaporous concept, that meant either charging customers later on, or selling advertisements, or both.

They bought in, and now the Internet is pulverizing them…Following our lead, companies have now trained a generation of young people to never, ever, ever expect to pay for content on a laptop or desktop. [Read More]